Ex-S.F. police officer probed by FBI sues bosses

He says former bosses wrongfully fired him

Published 4:59 pm, Friday, November 29, 2013

A former San Francisco police officer at the center of a 2-year-old FBI corruption probe into police drug raids is taking his former bosses to court, claiming in a lawsuit that he was wrongly fired based on unfounded allegations that he put in for overtime he didn't earn.

At the heart of Reynaldo Vargas' argument is a Police Department audit that found that many officers did exactly what he was accused of doing: testify during trials on regular time but put in for overtime. Yet he was the only one fired, Vargas' appeal attorney says, calling his punishment "unduly severe."

Vargas, now 44, was already in trouble before the Police Department fired him last year. He was among a team of officers based at the Mission District station whose conduct in a February 2011 drug-related search of a residential hotel on Julian Street has come under FBI scrutiny.

Surveillance video of the officers taken inside the Julian House Hotel appears to show Vargas walking out of the search target's room with a bag of the person's possessions, which Vargas never checked into evidence. Another officer was filmed walking out with a bag that authorities believe contained the person's laptop computer, which police also never submitted as evidence.

Vargas was also among several officers involved at a drug-related search in December 2010 at another residential hotel, the Jefferson on Eddy Street in the Tenderloin. One of Vargas' colleagues was filmed by a surveillance camera there taking away a bag of undisclosed possessions, which the officers never accounted for.

District Attorney George Gascón, who was police chief when the raids happened, turned over the investigation to the U.S. attorney's office to avoid the appearance of a conflict of interest.

No criminal charges have been filed, and none of the officers in any of the raids has been brought up on disciplinary charges. About a dozen officers remain under investigation, sources say.

Vargas' defense attorney in the hotel raid case, Harry Stern, said Vargas denies wrongdoing. He added that although he is not Vargas' lawyer in the overtime case, "the technical and picayune nature of those charges certainly leads to the possibility that they were trumped up because of the complete lack of evidence on the hotel cases."

100 cases scuttled

Public Defender Jeff Adachi said questions about the officers' conduct resulted in prosecutors scuttling about 100 criminal cases. He said federal investigators met with attorneys in his office in December 2011.

In 2002, Vargas was suspended for six months after being accused of gouging a man's face with a broken crack pipe after he took him off a cable car for fare evasion. He admitted in 2005 to using excessive force, and the city paid the victim $60,000 to settle a lawsuit.

After he showed up in the drug-raid surveillance footage, Vargas was moved to non-field duty at the Hall of Justice.

Overtime case

Vargas was still there in September 2011 when police officials brought him up on disciplinary charges for allegedly claiming overtime when he testified in court on what the department maintained was regular duty. The Police Commission fired him in May 2012.

According to the appeal to his termination in San Francisco Superior Court, police supervisors accused him of 13 false-overtime claims from 2007 to 2009, totaling more than 12 hours.

Vargas says he's innocent and that the department hasn't fired any officers who actually filed fraudulent claims. Its system to track such claims, the suit says, is flawed and cannot be used to justify misconduct allegations.

'Pervasive problem'

In the appeal, Vargas' appeal attorney, Christopher Shea, noted that the Police Department conducted an audit in 2009 and found such overtime abuse was a "pervasive problem" in the department.

In an interview, Shea said Vargas was being fired for a "technicality - an error in overtime paperwork."

He would not speculate what role, if any, the hotel accusations played in the overtime case, saying, "You'll have to ask the department that."